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Brick oven book recommendations please

Brick oven book recommendations please

My ambition is to build a brick wood fired oven in my back garden, can anyone recomend a good book with plans and building instructions. I plan to use as much reclaimed material as possible to keep the cost down, so it will take me a while to collect what I need. In the meantime, I need to read and to plan my adventure.

It was difficult to find the free plans but what you need to is go through like you are purchasing them but the price is $0.00. They want your billing name and address and stuff but I figured it was worth it for the free book.

It does have some good information. I will be building mine soon as well. Good luck with the reclaimed material. Most material is quite specific and not something most people discard. like unused concrete, fire brick, fire mortar, I guess Items for the stand 8x16 block or metal studs could be found and used for the stand and housing.

Thankyou Mizrachi, I logged on to Amazon and looked up the book and added it to my wish list. The Amazon site also came up with a suggestion of, Your Brick Oven: Building it and Baking in it (Paperback). There was a secondhand copy at £4 with free delivery, so I just ordered it; I could pay that for a pint of beer in some places :-)

you can go to www.traditionaloven.com you will find lots of pics how to etc and if you want plans on cd quite cheap and the oven works very well. you can see Rado sells to all countrys and is quite a character

Agreed. Rado's CD has tons of information the price is very reasonable. For books, _The Bread Builders_ is the place to start, or _Building an Earth Oven_ if you want to try a simpler earth oven before committing to brick.

I borrowed Building an Earth Oven from a friend, I studied it and was going to build a clay oven. The problem here in the UK is the rain, a clay oven would have been washed away last night with the heavy rain we had. Granted, I could build a shelter for a clay oven, but I really like the look of those brick ovens; makes ny neighbours little brick BBQ look insignificant :-P

Having built an oven relying on a combination of information from Bread Builders and Forno Bravo it is worth noting some key differences. The Scott style ovens are VERY heavy with very thick walls and are generally on the small side for pizza. They take several hours (up to 3 or 4) to heat load from a cold state and are best for daily use where the residual heat gives a head start and when you want to bake three or more consecutive batches of bread. Pizza ovens are more versatile in that they heat faster (typically an hour or less) and are useful as an alternate to a grill. Both have enough heat carryover to cook roasts, stews, etc. the next day.

A big and important difference between the two designs lies in the hearth design and heat loss through the hearth. The Forno Bravo base has lots of hearth insulation and that seems to be highly desirable. (My pizza oven on a Scott base loses too much heat through the hearth IMO.) The mantra at Forno Bravo is "insulate, insulate, insulate" and I think it is smart.

The one key advantage I give the smaller Scott designs is that they can accommodate smaller batches. I find that my one meter pizza oven needs about 15 pounds of dough to generate enough humidity to give the crust I want in my WFO bread. Since I am not a commercial baker, that is way more than I typically want to make. Even a smaller Scott, however will probably need eight pounds. There are those who will probably say spraying will solve the problem. My experience says it is NOT the same result.

Call me crazy. My largest problem is where to put the WFO. I have 40 acres to choose from. It would be nice close to the house but I have plans to move the house to a nicer location (off the road) and I have locations that would be nice but I don't know how it would work there or if it weren't just out the back then would I tend not to use it as much. So here is the crazy part, I was thinking of making it mobile. Build it on a trailer and move it around and not worry about this permanent fixture. The good part for me is I have equipment that can move it to a permanent place once I find where that is. Any guesses on how much a WFO weighs? I'd need to keep it under 7,000 lbs if I want to pull it off the trailer. So I would be interested in your thoughts. and I already used the crazy one.

There exists ovens on wheels already. I have seen them pulled around and parked at city events where bread is baked and sold to the crowds. A Brotfest portable oven. You can get lots of ideas just from the pictures, like putting the oven on a fork lift pallet and such. Note the sturdy trailers or wagons under the ovens. Have fun... Click at the top of the page for the English version then click on the Baking village.

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